Magnus Hirschfeld

Born into a Jewish physician’s family in Kolberg, Prussia, he took his medical doctorate in Berlin in 1892. On 15 May 1897, in his flat in Charlottenburg, he founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee with the publisher Max Spohr and others, became its chairman and launched a petition to abolish Paragraph 175, which punished sex between men; August Bebel brought it before the Reichstag the next year, without success. From 1899 to 1923 he edited the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries and argued, through his theory of sexual intermediaries, that every man and woman is a unique mixture of male and female traits, so that homosexuality is an inborn variation that cannot be punished. His role as an expert witness in the Eulenburg affair trials of 1907–1909 made him widely known, and in 1910 his book The Transvestites coined that word.

On 6 July 1919 he opened the world’s first institute of sexology in Berlin-Tiergarten, and the same year he advised and appeared in Different from the Others, the first film about homosexuality. He organised an international congress for sexual reform in Berlin in 1921 and in 1928 founded the World League for Sexual Reform in Copenhagen as one of its presidents. He used the language of eugenics but sought its aims through education, contraception and legal abortion rather than coercion, and firmly rejected Nazi racial hygiene and euthanasia. Nationalists and Nazis made him a target: in 1920 völkisch activists beat him so badly in the street that the police at first declared him dead, and in 1926 he visited Moscow and Leningrad at the invitation of the Soviet government. In 1929 opponents within the committee forced him to resign the chair. He left in 1931 on a lecture tour of the United States and then around the world, never returned to Germany, and on 6 May 1933 Nazi students looted his institute; its library burned four days later in the book burning. After a failed attempt to found a new institute in Paris he died in Nice on his 67th birthday in 1935. His rebuttal of Nazi race theory, written in exile, appeared posthumously as Racism (1938). His gravestone bears his motto, “Per scientiam ad justitiam”—through science to justice.

Hirschfeld had as many long-standing colleagues as opponents. Max Spohr, the publisher who co-founded the committee in 1897, issued his early works, beginning with Sappho und Sokrates (1896), and the physician Georg Merzbach was his deputy from 1905 to the First World War. In 1898 August Bebel brought his repeal petition before the Reichstag.

He opened the Institute for Sexual Science in 1919 with the dermatologist Friedrich Wertheim and the psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld, his most important collaborator and its chief physician until 1926. Ludwig Levy-Lenz and Felix Abraham performed the world’s first sex reassignment surgery at the institute in 1931, and Max Hodann ran its sexual counselling service until 1929. Kurt Hiller, whom Hirschfeld himself drew into the committee in 1908, revised the counter-draft of the Cartel for the Reform of the Sexual Penal Code at his suggestion in 1926, and Otto Juliusburger, who became chairman after Hirschfeld resigned in 1929, was a psychiatrist who had worked closely with the institute for years. In the women’s movement he allied with the bourgeois radicals around Helene Stöcker and Anita Augspurg.

Internationally he led the World League for Sexual Reform with Havelock Ellis and Auguste Forel, and Norman Haire, who came to the institute in 1923 with a letter of introduction from Ellis, became a lasting ally. In his private life Karl Giese lived with him from the early 1920s and ran the institute’s archive, and the medical student Li Shiu Tong, whom he met in Shanghai in 1931, supported his life in exile from his own fortune. Das lila Lied, the first anthem of the homosexual movement (1920), was dedicated to him as “the tireless researcher and friend”, and on his death Haire, Hodann and Hiller wrote obituaries.